People who think Harris saw the questions before the debate, you are fucking idiots. Those are the same questions they ask during every presidential debate and have since rocks were new.
What are you, 11?
There’s actually quite a lot to criticize Harris on but none of the conservatives seem to have the intellectual capacity to do so.
Trump’s or Harris’s chance of winning the presidency is 100% or 0%. The percentage that you’re actually measuring in a one-off contest that is not repeatable is the confidence in your model. So if you say, “Trump has a 55% chance of winning,” you’re really making a claim that you think your model has a 55% chance of being correct in that direction. These are two different things!
Yes, I know it’s pedantic, but in a single unique event what you’re confident about and what your actual claim is matters.
Silver’s model is clearly bunk even if Harris ends up losing. It has no resemblance to reality, but only to itself. It is a model of that models only its own parameters infinitely.
This says a lot about the American psyche and is, alas, correct.
Voting for Harris while living in California is gonna feel pretty pointless, but I’ll do it anyway.
Oh yeah. This isn’t even directly political; the media just needs the election to be a neck-and-neck horserace. It gets them many more clicks, and makes vastly more $$. That’s all is it is.
It’s still happening even with modern conflicts. Just today, saw some goober arguing that it’d be better (more “peaceful”) if Ukraine had just rolled over and surrendered to the Russians because Putin had very valid security concerns that justified killing tons of Ukrainians, and that the rest of Eastern Europe should also acquiesce when Putin comes calling (also for “peace”).
These people are terrible. But they are common.
In an increasingly information-heavy age where news also spreads quickly, polls are self-influencing both directly and indirectly. Most likely, we should just not do them, or not release them publicly if conducted by campaigns.
China is also paying the right-wing media and some of the more left-wing too. More to the righties, though. But Russia has been throwing absolutely huge amounts of cash at the republicans lately.
There are two things going on here. The article mentions one of them at the very end, but doesn’t really emphasize it. The first is that the media is beholden to the “both sides” narrative even when it makes absolutely no sense.
Imagine that someone powerful said, “I want to kill everyone with blonde hair, all 30 million of them. No mercy, no survivors.” And someone from the opposition said, “This is morally wrong and ethically unconscionable. I will do my best to prevent this genocidal atrocity.” The media would fact-check this into:
“The President says he wants to kill all the blonde people, but perhaps he was talking about the type of chocolate-free brownie. Since he hasn’t actually killed anyone, who can say? His opponent claimed that he was ‘genocidal’ and no blond person has been killed yet, so this is false.”
This absurd both-sidesing is inherent to our terrible journalism culture but there is also something else going on here. Even with Harris in the race, Trump still has a ~45% chance of winning it all. If he does win, these journos don’t want to be on the “enemies” list. And there will be an enemies list this time around for sure if Trump does take the prize.
Thus, part of this kowtowing is a very human, very understandable motivation. It is simply fear.
The reality is that the most likely outcome is that election will be so close all the polls are and will be nearly worthless. The “experts” will lie about them obviously after the fact as is their wont of late, but that’s just background noise these days.
The inevitable coup has a 50/50 chance of success following that if Harris wins.
I understand Trump voters. Do I also have to empathize with them?
No. I certainly do not empathize with them. Trump is an erratic, senile, spiteful, incompetent coup plotter. It doesn’t matter that I actually agreed with many of his policies, as much as they could be called policies given their poor real-world implementation.
Competence matters. And Trump is the opposite of competent. And a coup matters more. That many voters want to vote for someone after he has shown all of us exactly who he is says that those people deserve the pain they will cause themselves if he wins. Thus, no empathy from me. There is enough evidence to know what you’re getting and that you still want it says all I need to hear.
Inherent in Kristof’s argument, too, is the kind of moral relativism that often afflicts the left — this idea that the disadvantaged are somehow less responsible for their moral decisions than the rest of us are.
A lot of the left does enjoy pretending everyone who is not them is like a child. It’s annoying, it’s incorrect, and it does their side of the argument no favors. It breeds resentment in your opponents and causes their underestimation.
Our elites like Kristof are pretty bad. But the average dumbass who supports Trump after his demonstrated incompetence and his coup attempt is even worse.
Republicans have rejected nearly all of science; Dems only reject various inconvenient biological facts. That is a huge difference, though both are extremely annoying.
It’s striking how dense more-cerebral people like Kelsey can be sometimes. Most people are not statisticians and have no coherent way of thinking about polls or how the numbers are determined post-polling. Also, correctly, the hoi polloi recognize that no claim like this is made without a political dimension. Therefore depsite being statistically nearly-indistinguishable, Trump at 51% vs. Harris at 51% is also a potentially political claim about the future.
Regular people recognize this. People like Kelsey struggle with it as they tell us that philosophy is irrelevant while bombarding us with spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides.
Even though I was already cynical politically and jaded, Obama burned me badly. I’ll never be excited about a candidate again. I am absolutely certain Harris will break most of her promises and will most likely be a middling president. In our system, that’s pretty much guaranteed.
But I believe she will stand against China and will not be a senile, chuntering old man obsessing over past slights and grievances while America burns. And that is far and away enough to get my support.